


The Best Of A Bad Situation

by kalypsobean



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Courtship, Gen, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 14:48:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vanessa's mother decides the best way to "fix" the problem is to get someone else to take care of it. The problem is Vanessa herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Best Of A Bad Situation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aurilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/gifts).



"The best thing for you, my dear, is to get married!" She wanted to scream and clasp her hands over her ears, and scream until everyone backed away and left her alone. Of course they would think it better that they wouldn't have to deal with her; they probably thought it would be better if she never had been born, really, an angel they could pray to. Or if she'd died young, before all this happened, they could have kept a lock of her hair in a locket, or on a doll -yes, a pretty porcelain doll they could dress up and keep out in the parlour, there to remind everyone that they'd been through a loss and should be treated gently. They would put it in the laboratory or the greenhouse or the sunroom if they had the posh sort of visitor, and her glass eyes could stare into nothing and watch the plants grow and die until they remembered her and brought her back out.

They probably thought she was no different than a doll, on one of her quiet days. 

 

They paraded men in front of her, dragging them into her sick room and out again, until she'd seen all the men in the area and all of them had found something wanting in her. They tarted her up as if she wasn't able to do it herself, of course; they fluffed her pillows and dressed her in a freshly bleached nightgown, propped her up and tucked her in. She always felt a bit outside herself when they were done, although she'd learned how to keep everything inside by then, so as not to scare a stranger and, heaven forbid, bring shame to her family. All about image they were, now, anyway; they hadn't cared if it was something they could control, their faults at risk of display, but it hurt them for their daughter to be so visibly unwell, and the sympathy was wearing off. Nobody liked the infirm, after all, a virtuous obligation. She wasn't allowed to rail against being confined, or the restraints they hid under her sheets.

 

She was sick of people talking over her, as if she was not allowed to have a say in her own life, especially her marriage. At least she was spared the balls, though she didn't get to walk around at night anymore, feeling the cool air and watching shadows play over things and draw out their true essence, dark and tall and grim.

She rolled her eyes when her mother talked about her care. "She will need constant supervision," she said. "You might consider an extra maid." The more interesting thing, though, was the reaction of each of the men. None of them were ones she would choose for herself, of course; they were simple men, content with their little lives and little properties, and they wanted someone to manage the house and throw little parties and attend balls only to look pretty and smile at the right time. She was not a reflection of their wealth at all, not an appropriately submissive partner, and they would get nothing from her except a short window of goodwill, for taking her in, and sympathy, for all that she would not do. Her mother's care, however misguided though it was, was useful only to dismiss the men who were not looking at her; by holding everything in, she avoided being passed off, like a possession, a doll.

 

It stopped working with a small man, barely old enough to be courting. It showed her parents were desperate; she'd demanded to be let out of the sick room, her hands itching to stroke soft, cool fur and to look through glass eyes not her own.

"May I be alone with her?" he asked, his words carefully polite, but they had some edge in them that wasn't immediately obvious, and it wasn't sexual, not the way she knew. Her mother conferred with her father and they backed out, clearly stopping just outside the door. He looked in their direction, as if he too heard their footsteps stop and their hands on the wall, cupping the air to magnify the sound.

"My name is Victor," he said. He was careful as he approached the bed, no doubt having been warned of her outbursts, as they were called. "And you are Vanessa. Is that what you like to be called?"

"It is as good a name as any," she said. He was small, still thin in the shoulders, as if he too preferred the inside to the open fields and whatever sport was fashionable. 

"You seem too..." He paused, glancing towards the door, and then he sat on the bed, his back to her, but he could have looked over his shoulder, directly into her eyes. "This isn't how you are," he said. "You aren't sick, not really. Your face has too much colour, and it doesn't look like your arms have weakened, from what I can see."

"I'm not," she said. In turn, she looked at him, abandoning her facade so that she could focus on him. His hands, in particular, were clean and well-kept - he would be a doctor, of some sort, or an accountant, perhaps.

"I am a doctor," he said, as if he knew her thoughts. "Of a sort, at least; I am not here to examine you, or to court you, as it were." He would not look directly at her, she noticed, as if the very concept would break him. He stood and walked to the corner when she tried to meet his eyes with her own, catch him in a gaze where she could examine him and see into his mind, perhaps. 

"Are you here to see the mad girl, then? I'm not in a circus, you know."

"I am here to see you, but not like that." 

"You either are, or you are not," she said. His evasion is unusual, and she knows what hiding is like.

"I wanted to know why you stayed," he said, and he finally looked at her. His eyes had shadows around them, as if he slept less than she did. "I wanted to know if you really were able to see past death. It is a subject that fascinates me."

She notices that he pauses a lot, still; it isn't because he doesn't know the words, or takes care of which he chooses, she thinks; she suspects that he has so much in his mind that it takes him time to sort through it, as if even now, he is thinking about something else, and the gaps are when he is thinking something that is too big for him to understand as he is now, so young, almost pure, and yet not at all innocent.

"I can, as you say, see past death. I can see a lot of things," she says. If he were here to court her, and she wanted him, this is where she would lower her chin and her voice, indicating interest by inferring that what she saw was him, and that he interested her. Instead, she keeps her voice even, as if he let her be an equal, and they were colleagues. 

 

"Then I have an offer for you," he says. "I am going to London to school, and if you were to come with me, then..." he stops, and he smiles. "You could let me examine you, if you wanted answers, but nobody would know if you left me, either. You could be free of this place."

He bows to her, backing towards the door. "I will come back to hear your answer."

 

He is gone before she can speak again. Though she had wanted to be away from here, from the unrelenting off-white and the obsessions of her mother, the alternating tears and blame and pleading, it had never been so freely offered. She had tried, of course, and been rewarded with restraints, bars on the window and then no window at all. Until him, though, she had never thought of it as a prison, because nobody else had said she wasn't free.

"He wants to court her!" she heard her mother say. There were other words, but they didn't carry enough for them to hear. "Don't you dare do anything to stop this. You know how hard it is to keep her here like this, how much it costs." She stops listening, well aware of the burden she is constantly told she is.

 

She doubts he'll come back; he was too young, too small, and she was sure that his prospects were not so well that it would be seen as charity. It had been appearances that had gained him entry, she suspected. That was how it worked, after all; you must look like one thing, while being another where nobody can see. 

She made sure her mask was back in place before her mother came in, adjusting the gown and the sheets before the next doomed suit would be admitted.

 

He sent her a letter, brought in by a maid who seemed scandalised. It was still sealed, and she never read it.

 

Years later, she meets him again; he watches over her as she sleeps and fits, and even when she can't remember it all, she knows him, and finds some small comfort in knowing that his interests do not lie with her. Even when there is talk of confining her, keeping her away and hidden, he won't let them; in turn, she keeps his secret, letting him be what he is now rather than defined by what he was and where he was born. When she is surrounded by men who would use her and treat her as breakable, he sees her.

For that, she would show him kindness, though it would not be of a sort society would know even to frown upon.

**Author's Note:**

> There was this literary trend a while ago that women who were ill should be kept in a special room and basically treated like special snowflakes and venerated for how well they hid being sick. It was the main reason for stories like What Katy Did being so successful. The scenes of Vanessa in the flashbacks to that time evoked that for me and when I read aurilly's request it kind of morphed into this.


End file.
